Re: Questions on GSoC 2019 Ideas

[Duy Nguyen <pclouds@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 5:20 AM Christian Couder
<christian.couder@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Matheus,
>
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2019 at 10:46 PM Matheus Tavares Bernardino
> <matheus.bernardino@usp.br> wrote:
> >
> > I've been in the mailing list for a couple weeks now, mainly working
> > on my gsoc micro-project[1] and in other patches that derived from it.
> > I also have been contributing to the Linux Kernel for half an year,
> > but am now mainly just supporting other students here at USP.
> >
> > I have read the ideas page for the GSoC 2019 and many of them interest
> > me. Also, looking around git-dev materials on the web, I got to the
> > GSoC 2012 ideas page. And this one got my attention:
> > https://github.com/peff/git/wiki/SoC-2012-Ideas#improving-parallelism-in-various-commands
> >
> > I'm interested in parallel computing and that has been my research
> > topic for about an year now. So I would like to ask what's the status
> > of this GSoC idea. I've read git-grep and saw that it is already
> > parallel, but I was wondering if there is any other section in git in
> > which it was already considered to bring parallelism, seeking to
> > achieve greater performance. And also, if this could, perhaps, be a
> > GSoC project.
>
> I vaguely remember that we thought at one point that all the low
> hanging fruits had already been taken in this area but I might be
> wrong.

We still have to remove some global variables, which is quite easy to
do, before one could actually add mutexes and stuff to allow multiple
pack access. I don't know though if the removing global variables is
that exciting for GSoC, or if both tasks could fit in one GSoC. The
adding parallel access is not that hard, I think, once you know
packfile.c and sha1-file.c relatively well. It's mostly dealing with
caches and all the sliding access windows safely.
-- 
Duy